Guest: Dr. Frank MazzaPresenter: Neal HowardGuest Bio: Frank Mazza, MD is the Chief Medical Officer for Quantros Corporation. His resume spans three decades of healthcare experience. A physician by training (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Disorders), he still practices medicine on a part time basis. Prior to joining Quantros, he held several executive positions within the Seton Healthcare Family in Austin, Texas, including system-level Chief Patient Safety Officer and Associate Chief Medical Officer, as well as Vice-President of Medical Affairs at Seton Medical Center, Austin. Down through the years he has led organization-wide patient safety initiatives that have been recognized nationally for innovation.

Segment overview: Quantros is a leading provider of software and services to advance healthcare quality and safety performance. Our Software-as a-Service (SaaS)-based applications help thousands of hospitals, retail pharmacies and some of the nation’s largest health systems to capture actionable intelligence they can use to improve outcomes, reduce risks and to reinforce their commitments to delivering safer, higher-quality value-based care.

Transcription

Health Professional Radio – Quantros

Neal Howard: Hello and welcome to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host Neal Howard, thank you so much for joining us today. We all want to feel safe, we all feel that our healthcare professionals and providers are doing the outmost to keep us safe and to also keep themselves safe as they go about their daily business curing disease and research and what not. Our guest in studio today is Frank Mazza, he is here as Chief medical Officer for Quantros, here to talk about the safety and reporting industries as it relates to a healthcare. How are you doing today Dr. Mazza?

Frank Mazza: Neal I’m doing great. How are you?

N: Doing well. Quantros, talk about Quantros. Tell us what Quantros is involved in and how you become involved with Quantros?

F: Well Quantros is a company that’s been around for about 20 years. Our purpose is that we make software that allows companies to function at the highest level of quality that they possibly can. And also software that prevents errors that can lead to problems with patient safety.

N: Okay.

F: We were one of the first firms really in the world doing this. We’re quite well known in the industry and today we’re in well over a thousand healthcare establishments that include hospital, retail pharmacies and other organizations that are like that.

N: Now the software, how long has it been in development – this particular this latest update?

F: Well we continually update our solutions as you might imagine. We are particularly proud of the fact that our event reporting software that is something that we’ve been ruling out to all of our institutions over the past few year or so and it’s been very, very well received. The whole notion of event reporting is that if you want to be an organization that offers the safest care you possibly can, you have to know where your vulnerabilities are so you have to know where you make errors and you have to rely on certain people who have experienced those errors to enter that information into a system that you can aggregate that data and learn exactly how with those vulnerabilities are and how you could fix them. So we’re particularly proud because this solution that we have is one that allows frontline personnel to enter this information in as little as 2 to 3 minutes, and that’s very, very important because this is an era when healthcare personnel are working very, very hard, much harder than they ever have before. And patients are sicker than they have been before, so it really takes a significant amount of time away from patient care but they need to do if their event reporting system duties taken with them within 15 minutes.

N: Now you mentioned retail pharmacies, hospital, healthcare centers as it were, what about emergency care? Do you have software that is easily transitional between the two or do you specialize when it comes to emergency care, elder care, regular hospital care and so on?

F: To some extents, our software could be used in really just about any healthcare setting and it is used in any healthcare setting. That being said, I think that one of the things that we’re having to think about is that as the industry is moving away from sort of an inpatient focus to a more outpatient type care delivery, how do we evolve our solutions so that they can allow providers who are in those settings to get the most out of them?

N: Are you involved in telemedicine to any extent as it relates to safety and quality?

F: We would not be in the sense that we don’t deliver the care. Telemedicine is a unique and exciting and evolving type of healthcare delivery for certain settings and certainly we would be able to capture errors that occur event reporting system that transpire as a result of things that go wrong when you’re trying to deliver healthcare to a telemedicine form but really, reasons we aren’t that care delivery people we’re just assisting those folks in doing the best job they can possibly do.

N: Now does your software easily conform with say Sarbanes Oxley as that relates to any type of organization, as far as archiving information and evidence in data?

F: Oh I mean absolutely. Quite frankly I’m not so familiar with Sarbanes Oxley outside of the financial industry to be able to say that it’s relevant here but very clearly when you are when you’re trying to understand where you’re having problems in patient safety, you’ve got to be able to aggravate data in a manner that it tells you something about from the stand point of severity and also frequency where you’re having most of your problems because that’s where you really want to focus all of your efforts.

N: Where can we get more information about Quantros? What is your web presence as far as a website?

F: Well it’s a www.quantros.com or any individual who is interested could also dial 1877 QUANTROS. Quantros is spelled Q U A N like a Norman, T like Thomas, R O S like in Steve.

N: What are some of the myths that you might want to dispel when it comes to the incident reporting industry? And how Quantros is making strides to make that industry better?

F: Well much of what we know about incident reporting comes from other industries and in terms of the success of learning about errors and safety science and much of even those other industries, much of that information actually comes from the airline industry. And what we know from the success of the airline industry is, first the reporting system has to be very simple and easy. And as I said our most recent product is I think the fastest event reporting product in the industry. It’s got to be confidential, people are willing to report the errors that they made or that they witnessed but at the same time they have a fear of doing so to individuals who could take recourse against them. So our product is similar to what the airline industry has done, it’s confidential. The information has to be aggregatable and we use a taxonomy that allows these errors to be collectively analyzed in a way where again action can be taken by the affected organization. And there’s a number of other things that characteristics of very high quality event reporting systems and based upon the evidence and the science, we have work hard to incorporate all of those into our solutions.

N: You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard. We’ve been in studio this afternoon talking with Dr. Frank Mazza Chief Medical Officer for Quantros Corporation about the incident reporting industry. How Quantros can provide healthcare organizations with data feedback about their events that is actionable, measurable and most of all meaningful. It’s been great having you here with us today Doctor.

F: Same here Neal. Thank you for allowing us to be present and to speak with folks on your program.

N: Thank you so much. Transcript and audio of this program are available at healthprofessionalradio.com.au and also at hpr.fm and you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.

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